“I probably did. That splinter was in the corner of my eye through the lid. Kind of like pinned my eye partially shut.”
“Huh.” He nodded. “How did I not notice that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. You were pretty sick.”
“Yeah, I was. I kept having weird dreams,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like throwing up shoes.”
I laughed. “Probably because they pulled a shoestring out of your lung.”
“What?” he asked shocked. “No way!”
“Oh, yeah, pulled it right out. You gagged and all this water came out. It was really gross. The doctor said she never met a cowboy who was as big a baby as you.”
“I acted that badly?”
“No.” I smiled. “You were really good.” I kissed him. “I’m glad I didn’t lose you.”
“Me, too. So ...” he sighed out. “I know we’re leaving. You haven’t told me much. What now?”
“Ha!” I pointed.
“What?”
“I can answer that question,” I replied. “We’re all ready to go. We have a small shipment of supplies, but we need to assess what all is needed to rebuild. Assess meaning we look for people that have survived and are displaced in our zone.”
“Then what?”
“Then we get supplies from headquarters. First order of business is food, water, shelter and medical. Anita is gonna handle medical until we get a doctor. After that, we figure out what we can contribute as a community and go from there.”
“And then …”
“Oh, stop.” I playfully smacked him. “Now you’re pushing it.”
“You know what, Jana? We made it through literal hell and high water. This survival stuff and rebuilding is going to be a piece of cake.”
I didn’t think it would be exactly a ‘piece of cake’, but we had a plan. It would be a long road, with no certain outcome. I was up for the challenge, what else was there to do?
Alice was designated driver of the bus. She had charted our course based on information she had gotten from teams that had left a few days earlier.
She wanted us to make one overnight stop. A full night’s stop so we could rest and be ready for what we faced when we arrived home.
The horse trailer was hitched, and the horses loaded, in fact, Lane and I were the last to get to the bus.
It wasn’t fancy, it certainly wasn’t going to be comfortable, but it would get us home.
“Got that fancy schmancy radio hooked up,” Alice told me. “But you’re gonna have to figure out the other radio thing once we get situated.”
“Skip said he would,” I told her. “Plus, if we can get the landlines hooked up, we’ll be golden.”
“Good luck with that. Let’s head out, we’re wasting daylight.” She called out an ‘all aboard’ and got on the bus.
Rosie’s grandkids ran by me. Rosie looked sad; she had finally processed she was never going to see her daughter again.
They had looked for her back before Alice brought them to Martin’s property, way in the beginning when the first funnel hit.
Her daughter was never found. That didn’t mean she wasn’t alive and looking for Rosie. That was on my list of things to do, people to look for.
My sister was also on the list.
I wasn’t sure when I would ever be able to make the seven hundred mile trip to look, maybe one day. The general told me once they had teams in Wyoming, she’d let me know.
I wasn’t giving up on seeing her again. I knew the chances of finding Eloise alive and fine were slim, until then I envisioned her far away, happy and smiling.
It was time to leave. Time to hit the road under better conditions to venture back home, to face what was unknown.
None of the teams from Olympus had made it that far west. We would be the first.
Our attitude was, if it was impossible to make work, to rebuild, then we would just find somewhere else.
Everyone was given the option to stay. Stay at Beckley or even work at Olympus Headquarters, but everyone like me, wanted to go home.
We had faced so much heading east to Olympus, dire circumstances that took people from us, but it never broke our spirit.
But we kept forging ahead, despite it all.
It is said you can never go back. That was true, especially in our case of going home. We weren’t going back; we were going forward.
TWENTY-SEVEN – IN CASE YOU WANT TO KNOW
Across the country, the twelve hundred mile journey we came across many places that could be rebuilt and many that could not.
Amarillo was one of them.
We saw evidence that reiterated that it was in our best interest to go east.
So many places were just destroyed.
I imagined future generations would go through the burnt remains of Amarillo, one day overgrown with foliage, a symbol of what once was and what happened. A visual history lesson. In fact, the entire country was a visual history.
There were many survivors we came across. Some had already been contacted by the teams, but the closer we got to Amarillo, the survivors were clueless there was even a rebuilding effort. They were far too focused on the numerous places just buried in three feet of mud.
I took down the locations and shared them with Nel.
While Amarillo was out for restructure, the small outlying communities were not.
Places like Vega, Wilderado and Bushland. Places that Martin, Liza, Skip and the others called home.
When we arrived, there was a sense of defeat. I don’t think a single person didn’t look around and say, “What’s the use?”
Odd things remained untouched. Little things like mailboxes and the farmer’s market fruit stand. The fruit stand was how we knew we arrived near Martin’s ranch.
Liza’s diner was a shell, the inside was a swamp of thick, muddy dirt. Skip’s Automotive was a pile of bricks.
The old phone booth, like the fruit stand, was fine.
The ranch was hit hard. The barn had finally fallen, at least half of it, the roof and two sides scattered about the property, a few posts
